As Long As Our Precious Wipeout Is Unaffected, We'll Sleep Tonight.

biz</a> has revealed that Sony has opted to close a "small number of projects" at its UK studios. The shift in resources is set to take place at Evolution Studios, Studio Liverpool and Studio London. Media Molecule are reportedly unaffected, while Studio Cambridge were not mentioned.

“It has been decided that production on a small number of projects within Studio London, Studio Liverpool, and Evolution Studios will be streamlined or closed due to a portfolio review and project prioritisation,” Sony said in a statement.

“This decision was made following an internal review of all games and it was deemed that with the incredibly strong list of exclusive first party titles coming up both this year and in the near future, resource should be reallocated to enhance those projects closer to completion.

“The affected first party studios have been and will continue to be vital assets within the WWS family, and have a history of producing genre defining games such as MotorStorm, WipEout, SingStar and EyePet. This decision will have no impact on the role that our first party studios will play in the future of all PlayStation platforms.”

While the media will try to blow this out of proportion, based on the information we have now it's probably nothing to worry about. Many of these projects were probably at the initial concept stage, and there's currently no real evidence of redundancies at any of the mentioned studios.

Our guess is that resources are being taken out of PSP and PSN projects to ramp up the production of NGP games. Studio Liverpool have probably been drafted in to support BigBig on Little Deviants for example. Presumably some NGP concepts have been cancelled in favour of announced projects too.

Speculation on our part, but until we learn more, that's where we'd hedge our bets. As long as Wipeout's cool, and people aren't losing their jobs, we're not too concerned.